Contents

Choosing a dom0 kernel

If your Linux distribution includes Xen Project and dom0 kernel it is recommended to use them. This provides benefits such as ease of install, good integration with the distribution, support from the distribution, and provision of security updates.

Xen Project PV domU kernel versions can be different from dom0 kernel versions. There's no need to upgrade domU kernel when you upgrade Xen hypervisor and/or dom0 kernel. The Xen Project hypervisor is backwards compatible, ie. it supports older domU kernels. If your domU distribution includes a Xen Project domU kernel, it's usually best to use it and not compile your own domU kernel.

Also please notice that mainline vanilla Linux kernel already supports Xen Project. Instructions how to configure and build a Linux kernel for Dom0 and DomU support are reported here: Mainline_Linux_Kernel_Configs .

1) See NetBSD Xen Project HowTo for more information
2) See NetBSD Xen Project User Guide3) OpenSolaris has been discontinued by Oracle, but Xen Project dom0 support is present in the latest 2009.06 release and later development snapshots before OpenSolaris was discontinued.
4) Illumos [1] is a fork of OpenSolaris, and Xen Project dom0 support is present in the Illumos sources, but it's currently unmaintained and untested. Interested developers should be able to make it work again, because it was working earlier in OpenSolaris.
5) See NetBSD Xen Project News6) Basic support with the following FreeBSD_Dom0#Shortcomings

Mini-OS

Mini-OS is a tiny OS kernel distributed with the Xen Project hypervisor sources (see extras/mini-os in the Xen Project source code). It is mainly used as operating system for stub domains that are used for Dom0 Disaggregation.